[Info-vax] Real live example...

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/20/2023 9:32 AM, bill wrote:
> On 2/20/2023 9:12 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> On 2/20/2023 8:01 AM, Jan-Erik Söderholm wrote:
>>>  From a press release last week:
>>>
>>> "Tietoevry is a longstanding Telia partner and will serve as a 
>>> strategic advisor to the project, which will start at the beginning 
>>> of March 2023. As part of the code and data migration process, 
>>> Tietoevry will harness Advanced’s professional services capabilities, 
>>> automated transformation tooling, and runtime components to eliminate 
>>> Telia Finance Final’s current dependency on OpenVMS. This includes 
>>> migrating an estimated 1.5 million lines of COBOL code plus other 
>>> programming languages to the cloud-ready language, Java."
>>>
>>> Press release:
>>> https://modernsystems.oneadvanced.com/news-and-opinion/telia-finance-selects-tietoevry--advanced-for-application-modernization-initiative/

>>  > Generally about their services for OpenVMS:
>>  > https://modernsystems.oneadvanced.com/services/openvms/
>>
>> There are companies specializing in migrating
>> from socalled "legacy" platforms to socalled "modern"
>> platforms

> The really funny thing about this is while migrating from legacy
> hardware to modern hardware for reasons like availability and
> expense are probably valid, that doesn't mean you should re-write
> your applications into totally different languages.  In particular
> going from a language designed to do the work you need done to a
> language with no particular target for what it is supposed to do.

For a Cobol/VMS application there are multiple options:
1) stay on Cobol/VMS
2) change both language and platform like to Java/Linux (*)
3) change just platform like to Cobol/Linux
4) change just language like to Java/VMS

Telia chose #2. They could have chosen #3.

More companies pick #2 than #3. They want to get off
Cobol and if they need to start a huge migration project
to change platform then they want to change the language
as well (changes in some code due to different context +
changes to operations + full test + project overhead is
not that much smaller than change all code +
changes to operations + full test + project overhead).

Note that the option VSI really want #4 is even rarer.

:-(

*) could also be C#/Linux or Go/Linux or polyglot/Linux
(like node.js for frontend and Java for backend all on Linux),
but Telia was supposedly Java.

Arne